Why the 2025 Oscars are the most unpredictable in a decade

For a while, Adrien Brody was sitting pretty.

- John Lui

For playing the immigrant architect Laszlo Toth in the post-World War II drama The Brutalist, he had won the key races in the lead up to the 97th Academy Awards on March 2.

He took home the Best Leading Actor prize at the British Academy Film Awards (Baftas) and a Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, making the 51-year-old the favourite to score Best Actor on Oscar night.

But at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards on Feb 23, his hot streak ended. Instead of Brody, Timothee Chalamet snagged the prize for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role for playing musician Bob Dylan in the biopic A Complete Unknown.

In recent years, roughly 75 per cent of winners at the SAG Awards have proceeded to win at the Oscars. Brody, at age 29, had been the youngest actor to win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in the biopic The Pianist (2002).

With his SAG loss, he looks less likely to add a second Oscar to his collection.

THE CULTURAL DIVIDE AMONG VOTING BODIES

Experts attribute Chalamet's surprise win to several factors.

The Brutalist, with its lengthy runtime of more than three hours, may have caused voter fatigue. Also, compared with the mostly American voters in the SAG, the international journalists who vote in the Golden Globes and the British voters at the Baftas respond better to the narrative in The Brutalist that for many immigrants, the American dream is a nightmare.